A Toolkit for Big Ideas
FALL 2013
By Felix Huang
Blum Center Student Assistant
BERKELEY - Big Ideas@Berkeley is a wildly popular, annual competition that catalyzes student innovators who have bold
visions for solving social and environmental challenges. This year some 600 students across 75 majors are participating in the
7-month program.
With the support of UC Berkeley’s Development Impact Lab (DIL), the Big Ideas Team created the Big Ideas Toolkit,
which is available free online. Designed to promote youth innovation competitions on campuses and in other organizations
worldwide, the open toolkit allows organizations thinking about starting their own ideas competition to benefit from the
expertise and processes that the Berkeley team has built over the last half-decade.
Along with developing and submitting idea proposals, the young trailblazers
who enter Big Ideas @ Berkeley join an exciting ecosystem of mentorship
opportunities, interdisciplinary team building, workshops, pitch sessions and
other initiatives that create an social entrepreneurship and innovation community
on campus. Word of the resulting student innovations has been spreading. “Cal
Berkeley is again in the vanguard as a new generation of student activists emerges
to help address some of the most pressing social issues of our era: energy
efficiency, Third World poverty and disease, and sustainable housing, among
others,” writes Business Week.
In its digital format, the toolkit is globally accessible, promoting
innovation and the development of big ideas far beyond the UC
Berkeley campus.
The Big Ideas toolkit provides detailed instructions for how to start, implement
and grow social innovation contests that also foster the development of youth
and student visionaries. In addition to laying out the broad goals of promoting
student action and breakthrough ideas that
drive the Big Ideas@Berkeley competition, the toolkit also spells out practical day-to-day
logistics for program implementers. Indeed, the toolkit’s reach-out section goes as far
as to include templates of powerpoints and email drafts. Other sections cover contest
formats, timing and management; and sourcing of funding, mentors, and judges. Perhaps
most importantly, years of experience at UC Berkeley have crystallized valuable insights
on how to effectively reach out to and inspire action from a diverse group of potential
young leaders.
This brand-new platform is already in use not only across the University of California
system, but also at Texas A&M,
Makerere University in Uganda,
Duke, and the College of William
and Mary. Universities are also
consulting the Big Ideas toolkit
to inform and improve already
established competitions, plan
new contests, and to stimulate
The toolkit can be used to help Universities and organizaexcitement and promote
tions start their own Big Ideas competition or launch a
system of other incentives to support innovation on a new
participation in a new series of
inter-campus Big Ideas@Berkeley campus.
categories. Phillip Denny, who
leads the Big Ideas team, envisions that “the toolkit will continue to
evolve as a living document, and that the student innovator success
Acopio, a past Big Ideas winner, designs software for coffee growers throughout
Central and South America.
stories from Berkeley will be replicated more broadly as more schools
use this new resource.”